Daily Archives: August 13, 2013

[Khalistan radicalism is one area where India has nothing to blame Pakistan’s ISI for that RAW has not itself been doing for many years (SEE: INDIA’S COVERT TERRORISM IN PAKISTAN DIRECT FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH: Praveen Swami). CIA spy and defector to the US, The CIA’s Previous Man In India’s RAW, Major Rabinder Singh, was in charge of an Indian counter-intelligence operation (CIT-J) within Pakistan’s Sikh community, which was a mirror image of the Pak operations that India is complaining about today. The unit was allegedly shut-down in 1997, but that is only allegedly true. Spy-vs-Spy will soon be the norm in the region, whenever Western operations crawl back home with their tails between their legs leaving the region in turmoil, just like the global economy. If the American leaders are really the “stewards” of the public trust that they pretend to be, then they would admit their grievous failures now and take immediate emergency measures to set us all upon a path of healing, while Obama and company are still permitted freedom of actions.]

“Inputs indicate that ISI operatives are known to have assured moral and financial support to pro-Khalistan elements for anti-India activities,” Minister of State for Home RPN Singh said.

He said the government has adopted an integrated approach to counter the attempts to revive militancy which include sustained vigilance along the borders, strengthening of mechanisms for intelligence gathering and sharing.

“A close watch is maintained on the activities of various groups known to have been engaged in trying to foment terrorist activities,” he said.

The Minister said the National Investigation Agency has been investigating into the funding of the banned Babbar Khalsa International (BKI).

Singh said the NIA has registered a case against Punjab-based operatives of BKI based on the allegation that they are receiving funds from UK-based BKI operatives to commit terrorist acts in India with active material and logistic support from Pakistan-based BKI leaders.

The current meeting of the presidents of Russia and Azerbaijan takes place to the backdrop of the non-meeting of Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart, Barack Obama. Ahead of Putin’s departure to “the Caspian” summit, Obama informed Putin that he wouldn’t come to the scheduled Russian-American summit in Moscow in early September. I believe it is not a coincidence. Russia should look soberly at what its partners from the West and from the East want from it. The recent developments made these desires clear.

Almost all experts both in the U.S. and Russia note that the story over Snowden is only a reason for Obama’s refusal to come to Moscow. Moreover, Snowden’s story is not Russia’s shame – disclosures by “the American Solzhenitsyn” throw a shadow on the U.S., first of all. And Putin did a big favor to Obama, because Putin released him from a trial over Snowden in the U.S., which would cause much more mockeries and indignity than the trial over Bradley Manning. In due time even Brezhnev preferred to send the author of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, abroad, rather than to the prison which Solzhenitsyn described in details. Thus, Obama appears in the position of Brezhnev in 1974: to put behind bars a person who reported on crimes committed by other people – it looks ugly.

So, the story over Snowden and the other stupid story – as if repressions will draw up with homosexual athletes from the U.S. in Sochi – are only covers of Obama’s refusal to meet Putin. For the Russian elite the truth is rather bitter: since the early 1990s Russia undertook a lot of efforts to make the West like it and build good relations with it. Worsening of relations with the U.S.A is unavoidably leading to worsening of relations with the EU. Why can’t we cooperate with the West? What do the Americans want from Russia?

All developments of the recent years show that the Americans want a change of the Russian elite and improvement in rotary tendencies in Russia, a new threat of collapse of the Russian Federation. The Western messages are clear. The vice-president of the U.S. Joe Biden long before of the presidential campaign in Russia in 2011-2012 made it clear during a visit to Moscow: the U.S. didn’t want to see Putin again in the Kremlin. When it happened and Putin became President in May, every month American and European mass media organized mass information attacks against him. The statement by the State Secretary Clinton on “non-freedom” of the Russian elections, Magnitsky’s act, the scandal over cancelation of American adoptions in Russia, fears over the new law on NCO-foreign agents, now fears over homosexual athletes in Sochi… In all these cases the attack technology was the same: a certain topic is chosen, Putin is presented as “a successor of Stalin”, Russian liberal media exaggerates it. At the same time nobody of them read amendments to the laws or the laws thoroughly.

Is it accidental? Of course it is not, as well as the American mass media’s support of Alexei Navalny in the elections in Moscow. If Navalny is one whom the Americans want to see in Russian power, it is a threatening factor. The participant of “Russian March”, the supporter of the motto “Stop feeding the Caucasus!” – several years ago Navalny would be presented as “a Russian fascist” by the American media. But today Navalny is “the true leader of the Russian people” who opposes Putin who is called by The Wall Street Journal “President of Russian ethnic minorities.”

After the Chechen campaign the Western “friends” of Russia realized that no ethnic minority, even the most aggressive, can destroy Russia. It cannot because the state is too strong, ties between people are too tight. The conclusion is that Russia can be destroyed only Russian ethnic nationalists who don’t know history of their multinational country. Navalny is one such people; he matches the image of “new Yeltsin”. The process of destroying the USSR underwent according to the same scenario.

It means that in relations with the West Russia will have to take a break – till our partners in the U.S. and the EU will become reasonable. The anti-Russian vector of the Western policy is only a part of the general non-professional foreign policy which makes Washington and Brussels intrude to Iraq and help the Islamist rebellions in Syria. The policy leads to losses, disappointments, and defeats.

What should Russia do? Along with general improvement of contacts with the East, priority should be given to relations with the CIS members. And from this point of view, the summit of Putin and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev is an important event. I believe the peculiarity of failed wedding of Russia and the West is realized by Baku.

Whither Central Asia after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan? That is the question on the lips of Central Asia watchers globally, as well as policymakers and pundits in the region. There are numerous theories, but few take into account the full picture of shifting geopolitical tectonics.

The narrative popular in some circles in Washington and propagated by some in Kabul and elsewhere in the region is that the greatest upcoming threat will be the potential “spillover” of extremist Islamism into the post-Soviet space.

The coming great power vacuum in the region, when the US loses interest and Russia finds itself less capable of asserting itself, is often linked to the supposed spillover effect to create a swirl of potential political instability, perhaps resembling the current tumult across the Middle East.

Leaders in Central Asia are said to be terrified of the potential for not just a Kyrgyzstan-style perpetual color revolution, but a military coup such as in Egypt or even the sort of prolonged civil war we are witnessing in Syria.

These are not illegitimate concerns for some of the leaders of Central Asia. Afghanistan itself certainly faces a very uncertain future. And there are parts of the wider region in which separatism and violent extremism are genuine potentialities.

But the question of whether Central Asia will emulate the Middle East after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a wrong one. Concerns about unrest in the region are generally not directly linked to Afghanistan’s political and security future.

Social conditions in every post-Soviet Central Asian state, including Kyrgyzstan, are not all that similar to the Arab world or Iran. Religious realities are not nearly as conducive to the so-called radicalization of populations. The motivations for unrest are specific to the region: its geography, identities and varied socioeconomic environments.

The best question to ask about the region does have to do with a great power vacuum, not because this might be filled by extremism and political unrest, but because the geopolitics of the region is fundamentally changing as the US withdrawal approaches.

Some of this is related to Washington’s priorities, but much of it is independent of that variable. The central question hanging over the region at the moment and going forward for the next decade will be: What role does China play as the most consequential outside actor in Central Asia?

The US is actively involved in a downplaying of priorities and curtailing of relationships in the region. Policymakers in Moscow, for all of their bombast, have shifted to a strategy of consolidation of interests and power.

Going forward, Russia will almost certainly focus on maintaining overbearing security relationships with the smaller states of Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Russia’s security influence in the rest of the region is token at best, while its economic leverage is in retreat in every one of its former Central Asian colonies. Plans for a Eurasian Union are a feeble rear guard action aimed less at NATO and the West and more at the increasing relevance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The SCO has China as its sponsor. And, while it is not clear at all that China has designs for control of any kind over Central Asia, it is the power with the most momentum in the region. It has now become cliché to say that Central Asia’s markets are flooded with Chinese goods and businessmen.

CNPC has supplanted Gazprom as the decisive energy player from Karamay to the Caspian, and it is now rubbing shoulders with Western energy companies offshore. CNPC and other Chinese companies are some of the only major investors in Afghanistan. Whether Beijing intends it or not, Central Asia is China’s for the taking.

The next question, therefore, that Chinese policymakers should be asking themselves about Central Asia, is about the political consequences, or perhaps responsibilities, of this presence.

The SCO summit later this year will focus again on Afghanistan’s future, but this is too little and too late. And at the moment, the SCO does not have the institutional tools to shape the security landscape of the region, whether the countries of Central Asia want it to or not.

Central Asia may not harbor the same kind of short-term threats as the Middle East, but it has its own sui- generis concerns and opportunities. Whether the region presents one or the other will depend much on China’s understanding of the role that has been thrust upon it.